Can you believe they've come this far by now? Once known as OpenBeOS, Haiku today announced the release of the fourth alpha for Haiku R1. It seems like only yesterday when BeOS died and OpenBeOS rose form its ashes, generating a new hope among the legions of avid BeOS fans. Now, almost twelve years later, we've hit the fourth alpha.

djohnston pretty much has it covered, but personally I don't like the UI all that much. I tend to span the deskbar and turn on single window browsing in Tracker whenever I do a new installation.

What drew me to BeOS in the first place (besides being an alternative to Windows 98 and GNU/Linux) was the amazing multimedia software that ran on it, as well as the simplicity and power of the file system. I could achieve a very productive and comfortable workflow that simply wasn't possible on any other OS at that time.

Since then I've found OS X to be close to my ideal both for audio work and for my general workflow, and recently KDE on GNU/Linux is manageable for the latter. But I have a feeling that a mature Haiku will be what I've really been looking for.